Due to health and safety concerns, it is often desirable to report certain classes of events from health care institutions to health departments or other organizations. Reportable events may include individual test results, environmental events, and clinical events. Whether or not the biological events are reportable depends upon the preferences of the entity requesting a report.
Health departments or other organizations in different jurisdictions may be concerned with different types of health care events. For instance, some jurisdictions may consider a streptococcal pneumonia diagnosis as reportable and others may not. Likewise, some jurisdictions may consider certain types of poisoning events as reportable and other jurisdictions may not be interested in the same events. Furthermore, jurisdictions are often concerned only with diagnoses of patients living in certain areas and/or with tests conducted in hospitals in specific geographic regions. Currently available reporting systems are unable to handle demands of multiple organizations in multiple jurisdictions. Accordingly, existing reporting systems operate within a single jurisdiction.
Furthermore, even within a jurisdiction, different clinical events may be of interest to different groups and individuals due to overlapping jurisdictional regions or internal departmental organization. For example, while a group of individuals associated with a particular health department may be concerned with a broad range of types of clinical events, specialists within the organization may be focused on specific types of reportable events.
In addition, different users may have different privileges regarding the information elements they are allowed to see. For example, an individual may be allowed to see only the number of results for particular conditions for trending purposes and not any person identifiable information such as name or address. Other individuals may need to see these elements for follow-up or further reporting purposes.
A cohesive system is needed that allows for determination of reportable events to multiple jurisdictions with varying requirements. A system is also needed that will report appropriate events to requesting groups and to requesting individuals within each group. Such a system should appropriately limit the number of reportable events so that no receiving entity receives a large amount of irrelevant data. The system should also allow restrictions to be placed on individual fields so that selected pieces of information will be masked for certain users.